[Mary] Hi there, welcome to Safety Labs. Potato, potato, tomato, tomato — that's how the old song goes. It's the story of a couple who have different accents, and presumably those accents represent different worldviews. They playfully suggest these views are irreconcilable, and say, let's call the whole thing off. By the end of the song, though, they realize that calling the whole thing off means they'll have to part, resulting in heartbreak — so they agree to accept their differences in the name of love.
What happens in real life, in occupational safety or organizational culture, when the difference isn't just accents, but words? Do different words represent different worldviews? And if they do, does it really matter? That's what we're discussing today. Our guest, Crista Vesel, is a safety communication specialist whose focus on the language of learning has helped government agencies and private companies around the world value their people during normal work and after incidents. Her research on the importance of language in workplace safety adds academic and practical knowledge across industries. She's an adjunct professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, in the Advanced Safety Engineering and Management Master's Degree Program, where she helps safety professionals become catalysts for cultural change and learning. Crista is the co-author of the book "Human and Organization Potential." Her company, Dynamic Inquiry, offers courses and coaching in HOP, learning reviews, and language reviews. Crista joins us from Santa Fe, New Mexico.
[Crista] Thank you so much, Mary.
[Mary] So when did you start looking at language in the context of organizational performance or occupational safety, and why? Can you walk me through how your thinking got to where it is today?
[Crista] Back around 2009, I was doing some consulting work for the US Forest Service. My husband, Ivan Pupulidy, worked for them — I know you've had him on before, he's the co-author of the book. He was attending a master's program at Lund University in Sweden, with Sidney Dekker, who originated the New View, which a lot of people have heard of — a different way of looking at accidents, incidents, and normal work. He was bringing that into the Forest Service at the time. I already had a strong language background — that's where I started, in communication — and I was brought in to help with things like accident investigations, not little ones, big fatality ones. The more dramatic an event is, the worse the language can get, honestly — we'll talk about that a bit later.
While I was working on some of these projects, Sidney Dekker asked me to actually join his master's program, which I did, at Lund University in Sweden — a university founded in 1666, a really old, established European university. It was in human factors and system safety, really about valuing people and looking at things differently than we had before, the New View in safety. What was interesting to me was that no one had really looked closely at the language around these accident investigations. They'd been putting them out there, honestly, for over a hundred years now, with basically the same language coming through — and it results in us not changing what we do. We think we're learning from events, but often we don't. I believed language was a big piece of that.
I was also involved with Ivan in creating the learning review, a new way to look at accidents, incidents, and normal work, very different from investigation. The learning review concentrated very specifically on language. As we put it out into the Forest Service, a large government organization, very hard to change — talk about a deep culture — we started changing the language, not just in accident investigations, but in how we were speaking with people, having dialogues. It wasn't long before that language started coming back to us, reflected back, words people never used to use. For example, their accident investigations used to be — they were abominable, frankly, and blamed people for their own deaths — they did not result in learning, and they injured a lot of people for a long time after the report came out. They used language like "cause." That's common in most organizations — what was the cause, what was the root cause. We stopped using the word "cause." We struck it from the learning review and replaced it with "influence." There's a big difference between causes and influences — cause is a dead end, it stops inquiry. When you start talking about influences — of the system, the culture, the people, the work — you're pulled forward into learning. It creates this dynamic, active quality that moves us all toward learning.
That's kind of where we started. Later, I worked with many different organizations, helping them improve and map their culture — a different way of looking at it, like a mind map. You ask, what are we looking at here, and you go off on this journey into the culture, asking why is it the way it is, who can we ask about that, who else can we bring in to reflect that back. Pretty soon you have a much greater understanding of the goal conflicts standing in the way of how you want work to be done. These aren't failures of people — these are areas where, as Todd Conklin would say, people are given bad choices. They don't make a bad choice.
About five years ago, I joined the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and that's what I teach now. Professor Pupulidy and I both teach in the program — it's about half the program, for people who choose the HOP track. We call it Human and Organization Potential, intentionally changing the word from "performance," because performance is something that's pushed onto people, while potential is a pull.
[Mary] You've already answered one of my later questions, about the difference between those two terms, which is great. In your biography, it says your company offers learning reviews and language reviews. Can you explain the differences and interactions between those two activities?
[Crista] Honestly, a learning review always has a language review involved in it, but some companies and organizations just want us to look at the language specifically, and start there. If we look at culture, I'll go to Edgar Schein's model — Edgar Schein was kind of the father of organizational culture, and he came up with the idea of an iceberg poking out of the water. You see parts of it, and underneath there are other things hidden. Ivan changed that, and we've changed it even further — now we have a different model, called the buoy model. Think of a buoy on top of the water — you can see it, visualize it. That's the artifacts of culture, the things that are easy for us to notice, that people from outside our culture can come in and see too, because they're that obvious. Unfortunately, that's where we normally focus, in accident investigation for example, or even when looking at normal work — we look at the behaviors of workers. But behaviors are artifacts, not what's underneath. From the buoy, we go down a chain to what we call the espoused values — the things we say about our culture, or hear about it. And then the very base is the anchor of that buoy model, the part tying us to where we are right now. Very hard to move the anchor, but that's where we need to go — we need to question it deeply to see what's underneath, what's really pulling us away from where we want to go.
A language review looks at language, which is in a way an artifact — there's a lot of artifact in it — but it's also the espoused values, what we're saying and hearing about our culture, and it can also be the anchor. Language can anchor us to where we are right now, and if we change it, we may be able to change other parts of our culture too. The learning review, as I said, is a different way of looking at accidents and incidents — we look at the network of influences around an event, which could be a negative event or a positive one. We encourage people to do reviews of positive events too, because it's a great time to practice — you don't have the drama around something like somebody dying, so it's a time you can experiment, and that's a word I hope people add to their vocabulary at work. Feel free to experiment, because it really is an experiment, even if we don't think of it that way. If we move toward it as if it is an experiment, using that metaphor, it frees us up to do so much more, and to not feel as judged if things don't go the way we think they should.
[Mary] I want to briefly talk about a paper you published — I believe through ASSP — titled "Agentive Language and Accident Investigation: Why Language Matters in Learning from Events." Let's start at the beginning — what is agentive language?
[Crista] This is super important. An agent is the doer of an action — you could say the cause of an action. The challenge is, sometimes people are agents of an action — I can take this pencil and drop it, and I'm the agent of that action. But what if it accidentally drops, like something hits my elbow? By saying I'm the agent of that action, now I'm assumed to be the cause, and we transfer that forward in safety work to say, "see, she failed to hold that pencil," or "she did this." Usually that agency isn't fully present, and yet we treat it like it is. Sadly, lots and lots of companies and organizations use more of a criminal process for looking at accidents than a learning process — but they'll use language that says, "we want to learn all we can from this," that's the first line. The rest of the language, and what they do with it, stops them from actually learning.
So agentive language is when we say something — I'll give you an example. Here's an accident investigation's causal factors findings, from the Cramer Fire, which happened, I think, in the 2000s — this was a Forest Service fire — and here's what they found as causes. The word "cause" itself becomes agentive, because now we're looking at something, not an interconnection of things. "Management oversight was inadequate" — that's agentive toward management, saying they were inadequate, but that's a hindsight look at something that wasn't known in the moment. As things are emerging in the moment of work, we're still making sense of this complex, evolving, dynamic system — we can't fully predict or control a complex system, and any system with people in it is complex. So that alone is not good language.
Then: "There was a failure to comply with policy." "Failure" is a hindsight look, but very, very agentive — attributing that to people locks us into believing something was simpler than it was. Machines fail. People don't fail — they usually do their best in the moment to make sense of what's emerging, what's happening. That "failure to comply" is even stronger agentive language — it implies all they had to do was follow the rules and they would have been safe, when that's very infrequently actually the case. That language locks us down.
Another: "There was a failure to recognize and adjust suppression strategy and tactics." Failure, again. Let's expand on this a bit — as people, we have a great need for certainty, and we'll do just about anything to gain it. You could go all the way back to cavemen needing some certainty they'd get something to eat that day. In our daily lives, we have this need for certainty and closure — we want to finish things off. In our work, we see this constantly — there's a need for certainty that we're going to have safe operations, and also that we're going to make our quota for the month and survive as a company, and those things are in contrast to each other, pulling against one another.
This is where binary opposition comes in. When we have a need for certainty, we tend to simplify our language to feel better about the world — we use terms like right and wrong. There's not really a right, and there's not really a wrong — there's judgment, someone with the power to decide what's right and wrong, but they don't exist on their own, yet we use that language all the time. In this accident investigation, they use the word "failure," which I believe is a tremendous binary opposition — its opposite would be "success" — but we never think about that. We get pulled toward the failure side, and we don't notice the gray space in between, which is where learning can actually happen. We stop ourselves from learning because we get drawn to the failure side. That accident investigation didn't result in positive things — many negative things came out of it too — but it didn't result in learning.
We have to ask, how can we do things a little differently? We're always pulled toward our need for certainty. We have to recognize when that's happening — "wait, I have a need for certainty, our team has a need for certainty, maybe it's the investigation team itself" — and ask how we can expand and learn in the moment, learn from each other. Maybe that investigation team watches for each other's biases and helps each other recognize when they're moving toward a more biased side, and offers some balance. We don't use the word "accident" or "investigation" in learning reviews — we might use the word accident, but the problem with "accident" is that even if it is one, in most workplaces it gets treated like it was on-purpose. That's a problem, because it results in language like these causal factors that didn't do anything to help them learn, but did a whole lot to assign blame.
[Mary] When it comes to worker safety and these kinds of investigations, do you think organizations are, by and large, asking the right questions? And if not, why not, and what would those questions be?
[Crista] Great question. First, I'm going to pull the word "right" right out of there, because again, we don't have right and wrong, that's a binary opposition — if we can all move away from binary oppositions, we're already going to do better. So, what kind of questions are being asked? Sadly, a lot of companies use accident investigation approaches that focus on something called the Reid Technique, which was developed for police officers, for law enforcement. Here's the question — should safety people be doing anything resembling criminal investigation at all? What do you think, having interviewed so many people?
[Mary] I think it's dangerous to think of things that way, and like you said, there's no space for learning in that. The Reid Technique is like an interrogation technique.
[Crista] Yep — in fact, the suspect's guilt is presumed as they begin. Sadly, that's how we treat people, and usually it's our safety departments and teams doing these, I'll just say, reviews. If there's a belief there might be criminal issues, maybe that's not for the safety department to follow — maybe that's where HR gets involved. We're not there to condemn people or say they committed a criminal act — if we find that, it's time to pass that off.
[Mary] What else was there to my question — I think I asked, are organizations asking helpful questions, or questions that matter, and if not, why, and what would lead to better questions?
[Crista] Better questions, yes, super important — that's what we try to help our students develop. It's a technique, but it's not simple — it's not like you come in with great questions written down, and that's it. It's about valuing the person in the moment. If I'm with an interviewee, I'm trying to see them as a person, and honor their perspective. When you have different people with different perspectives around an accident, what usually happens in a general investigation is they try to make those different perspectives fit together into a quick, sense-making story — but it's not the story of the people, it's the story of the investigators. We do something very different — we go in and honor their perspectives, and the questions you ask are a big part of that.
Our questions can't be binary. We can't ask something they could easily answer yes or no to — first of all, that gives us no information, it just stops the whole process. We want them to be comfortable in the moment, to develop some psychological safety, so they're willing to share their story — consider it a story, instead of a factual narrative or account, because if we interview five people, we'll get five different stories, and that's okay, because each had a different perspective in that moment. It might be as simple as standing in different parts of the room, or having a different relationship with the company, or one being an expert at the task and one not. Every one of them can add to the story, and we can understand it from a fuller perspective.
The questions need to be open. It's very common for people to ask questions that are already loaded with their personal bias — they already know the answer. We need to come not from a place of knowing, but from a place of true, humble inquiry. That's hard, it takes a lot of practice, and you won't be good at it all the time — you'll come out of some interviews, or even just conversations at work, thinking, gosh, I could have done better there. Keep practicing, keep experimenting, look for open-ended questions that let the person expand. It might be as simple as asking, "how was your day today?" That's a very different question than "why did you put your finger in the machine?" "How was your day today" might surface other things going on — stresses in their life, social relationships that were distracting them, or maybe discomfort with that machine, or that it's recently changed. It opens us up, and sometimes gives us information we never dreamed of getting. Don't assume there's only certain information we need because we have to fit it on a one-page review — safety flashes, four-square summaries, that kind of thing — some people are forced to reduce everything down to one page. There are ways to handle that better, but don't expect perfect language or communication — we're not going to get that, but we can get better. If we move toward humble inquiry and ask honest questions that don't presume we know the answer, we're already better off.
One more thing — be careful asking "why." People center on that word a lot, and especially around an event, it can make someone so uncomfortable they won't share — they feel they have to defend themselves, no matter what they actually did. Get rid of "why." Ask questions starting with "what" instead — "what do you think happened," or "is there something we can learn from this." Those are much more powerful, open questions than "why."
[Mary] I have a bit of a long quote, but bear with me, from the book, because I think the question it raises addresses some of what you're talking about: "HOP helps us address the complex and messy human aspects of our work environments, where uncertainty exists and full prediction is an illusion. This does not mean that other interventions do not have a place in our systems of work. Simple mechanical failures will respond well to the type of interventions common in organizational control manuals and instructions, which are investigated with linear causal models." Keeping that in mind, I've seen a lot of dichotomies in how the safety profession discusses itself — traditional versus New View, or command-and-control versus Safety Differently. I recognize those terms have particular meanings, and I'm not super interested in litigating that, but I want to talk about the idea of dichotomies in safety discussions generally. Do you think an either-or mentality is prevalent in how the safety profession discusses itself?
[Crista] I think so. We've had over a hundred years of what we'll call the traditional, or old view, and in some ways that started with Heinrich's work. Heinrich worked for an insurance company, did some studies, and found that a very high percentage of accidents were caused by people — human error. Nobody can find his actual research now, no one's ever been able to prove that, but it doesn't matter, that's what we carry with us. To this day you'll still hear that eighty-five percent of accidents are caused by humans, and that already shuts a lot down, because now we're thinking, well, if the human is the cause, that's what we'll look for. Sadly, that's what a lot of accident investigation manuals do, including the one the Forest Service used before the learning review, called the Serious Accident Investigation Guide — the very first paragraph says most accidents are caused by humans. So that's what you're looking for, right off the bat.
We have that huge legacy to overcome. In the last twenty years or so, Sidney Dekker, David Woods, Erik Hollnagel, Todd Conklin, Ivan Pupulidy, and others have been trying to introduce new language, new ways of doing things, and it's become kind of a dichotomy — I'd say it was, for a while. What we're seeing now is less of a dichotomy and more of a pull toward, we'll just say, the HOP side — though that's a label too, and labels limit us, don't tell the whole story, but our need for certainty makes us want to use them anyway. We're getting pulled toward something else because we need something else. We have a lot of accidents that do involve people — is that human error, or an influence of the system, of not being given the tools or information they need, or the ability to collaborate and sense-make in the moment? There's a lot going on that's messy. So yes, there's a binary opposition of language in some ways, but we're seeing more companies that used to be very traditional starting to move a bit in the other direction, starting to use some of that language too, which is exciting, because we all need to.
[Mary] Have you seen, or do you know of, examples of companies that have moved in that direction to the exclusion of more traditional safety practices? Or are they more nuanced, finding ways to reconcile the two?
[Crista] There was actually an interesting article recently about this — it said there's a bias forming that says we can never say a person made a mistake or did something wrong, almost too much of a pull in that direction in some places. You can swing too far the other way too, because there's still complexity involved — you always have some simple or complicated elements, some machine elements, rules and regulations, that need to be looked at through other lenses as well. Sometimes you have a person in a job that just isn't right for them, and if they're allowed to make the same mistakes over and over, that's not helping them or the agency — you need to look at that too and say, maybe they need a different position, maybe this isn't right for them, and be willing to say something's not working here, let's figure that out.
The way we do that is by working with people and saying, help us understand this event, help us learn from it, we're doing a learning review — the idea is to learn, not to punish or blame. And if you can honestly say they won't be punished by the agency or the company, say that. If you can't say that, be honest about that too. You need to develop what we call a container — you're meeting with people, having a dialogue, which is different from an investigation, different from an interview. Interviewing still has a one-directional feel — dialogue, through the word itself, is a shared space between us, let's see where we can go together, we don't know where we'll end up. That's already much more open than how most things start. Inviting people into that space, creating a container of psychological safety — there are ways to do that. For example, if I'm an interviewer or investigator and I come in with pages, writing the whole time — that's an affordance, something that allows, or even begs, for a certain action — and in this case it's blocking communication, saying "I don't value you." For listeners who are only hearing this, what Crista's doing is holding a piece of paper partially in front of her face.
[Mary] Thank you, yes, I forgot to describe that part.
[Crista] If we hold a clipboard in front of us, and maybe we're the only ones with one, what if we empower the other person too? Maybe we're not just interviewing one person as if they're the guilty party — maybe we bring in a group, have a real dialogue, and say, "I'm going to be writing some notes here, and you might want to too — here's a notepad and a pencil for you, feel free to write whatever you want, or ask us questions." That creates a more power-neutral environment — I'm not the only one in power anymore, I've empowered you. Thinking about little things like that — it's not just language, it's communication, what we do in the moment in that space. What are we affording them? Are we sitting in chairs, in a circle? Should we be outside, if it's a beautiful day? Maybe we ask, where would you like to meet today, where would you be most comfortable having this conversation?
[Mary] I'm sure you've encountered people who feel that examining language is too abstract and detached — people who say, you can talk about language all day, but in the end, if you don't have fall protection, that's the problem. What are the most common misconceptions you encounter about what you do, or your approach?
[Crista] Interesting question. Yes, we come across people who don't think they need to value language. We drop back from that and start talking about culture, about the things influencing them, and ask open questions, because we want to know more about them. If someone is opposed or blocking something like this, we need to map their influences too — they're also under the influence of things. What are their fears? Are they afraid they won't make money, won't get a bonus, will look stupid? How can we create space for them in that moment? Because we're not just talking about interviewing people who were part of an accident — we're talking about engaging with everybody, leadership, managers, safety people too. We need to learn about them as well, and only then can we move forward with an understanding of what's driving them, what their fears might be. Then we can start to show them, "see, language doesn't seem important to you right now, but here's how it might actually help."
[Mary] Let's talk about a big term, safety culture. In the book, I'm curious about different facets of culture, sub-cultures of safety culture, based on the work of James Reason. If someone asked you to explain safety culture writ large, how would you go about that?
[Crista] Honestly, I wouldn't. There's a real challenge with how we communicate with each other generally — we reduce things down to labels. "Safety culture" is a label, and it doesn't really say much at all. I'll quote David Woods, the cognitive scientist and engineer — Ivan and I once took him zip-lining in Boise, Idaho, and he came out with a great quote I wrote down and use all the time: "Labels can masquerade as explanations." That's what happens all the time — we use the label "safety," the label "culture," stick them together, and think it means more. If we're in a room of people, we often do this experiment — write down what your definition of safety is, what is safety, what is culture. We get all kinds of answers, even if it's the dictionary definition, which doesn't help us understand what we actually mean by it.
Take the word "safety," which is a nominalization — a word that should be a verb, something we can do something with, but we've turned into a noun, which takes away all the power. Helen Sword has a great little video about nominalizations as "zombie nouns," sucking the power out of words. "Safety" has had that happen to it. Safety doesn't mean the same thing to you as it does to me in this moment, or next week, in this environment versus that one — we need to activate it again. The best thing you can do is ask people, how could we be safe today, how can we make safety dynamic and actually do something with it, what does that mean today, in this work? "Safety culture" doesn't really mean anything — it's just culture. Culture has all sorts of things we could map out forever, and there are things we could say are part of safety, but depending who you ask, it may or may not be. So we don't really like the idea of "safety culture," because it simplifies something much more complex, and in simplifying it, takes away a lot of its power.
[Mary] I'll continue with labels, then — these labels for sub-cultures, while they are labels, do speak to different facets of culture: informed culture, reporting culture, just culture, flexible culture, and learning culture. We don't have to go through each one, but how do they play into understanding an organization's culture?
[Crista] When we put those in the book — this is more Ivan's realm, I'd have him answer more fully — but I'd say we wanted people to realize there are many different areas of culture. Honestly, what Reason wrote about it was kind of bounded, not as open and dynamic as it could be, so Ivan made it a bit more dynamic. What we focus on more is learning culture — that's the main piece, and all the other pieces are part of that. You want a sharing culture too — you want people to speak up, "see something, say something" — well, there's a label. Why aren't they speaking up? What have we created in our culture that blocks them from wanting to or being able to? Do you have a "zero" clock ticking up on the wall that nobody wants to reset? The organization might say, don't worry, we're not going to punish you — but accountability goes much deeper than that. What about your peers, how will they feel? Does it mean we won't get bonuses? What does this mean for us if we stop that clock? Do we even know? It's just a frightening thing to do.
Moving toward learning in general — and I'll touch on language quickly — we need to develop a language that helps us move toward learning, which means stopping coming from a position of knowing, of being the knower, and moving instead to a place of inquiry. In that space, we can learn so much, and that's where we start drawing from people's stories, where we transform, and move together in that dynamic place.
[Mary] You may have just answered this, but I'll ask it anyway in case there's more to add — what would you say to listeners who think, okay, this is all resonating with me, but how do I even start to practically implement a shift in my organization?
[Crista] First, you start by shifting yourself. Start to notice when you're using a binary opposition — success, failure, yes, no, black, white, whatever it is — if you're heading toward one of those ends, how can you pull back to the middle, where you can actually learn something? Notice whether you're in a true place of humble inquiry, or coming in already knowing the answer, because if you're in that space, you can't learn anything. Start recognizing that so many of the words we use are either labels or metaphors — we use metaphors because we don't have the time, energy, or maybe the ability to describe everything we mean, so we liken it to something else and hope everyone thinks the same thing — that's another form of labeling. You can't assume other people see the world the way we do. Kenneth Gergen, a tremendous professor Ivan and I have worked with a lot, has a great book, "An Invitation to Social Construction." He says in there, "words create worlds" — and you started this whole conversation today with almost those words.
[Mary] Words create worlds.
[Crista] They do. So what kind of world are we trying to create? One that's open, learning, full of inquiry, or one we're shutting down? We all shut down sometimes, by nature — we want certainty, we don't have time. But at least in some areas of your life or work, start to change that, start to question some of the labels, invite others in. "We're talking about risk here, we're thinking we'll reduce that to a number today" — well, what do we really mean by risk? What do you see as risk in this environment today, how could that change, what should we do if it does, how can I help alert you if I see something that's risky or different? How can we move our language forward to open us up more, instead of shutting us down more?
[Mary] You have a hand in training the next generation of safety professionals. Looking at people coming into programs, where do you think the focus in training should be? Or, are there areas where you feel there's a lack of focus, not enough emphasis on what people are learning as they train?
[Crista] First, I question the word "training," because it has a connotation.
[Mary] No, no, I knew you were going to pick up on that.
[Crista] By using your language, you invite me into something other people might learn from too — I see it as an opportunity. "Training" has a feel to it, a connotation — first, that you can complete it, check the box, and be done. That's not real learning, and it's not how adults learn. Adults learn because they value something, because they're allowed to help create it, and maybe pass it on to others — that's true learning. What we see with the people coming through our program, all adults, from every industry around the world, is a shift toward wanting to know more about this connection between people. As soon as they take my Crisis Leadership course, the first one in our program, which really invites them into this new dialogue, thinking about people, culture, sense-making, acknowledging our need for certainty — once they get through it, or even partway through, they're like, wow, my mind is blown, I had no idea, I'm seeing the world differently now, not just at work, but when I go home and interact with my family, I'm a different person. The shift can happen fast, and we see people hungry for it, because they see it working. A lot of traditional safety activities haven't really helped improve accident rates, and they're not making people feel better. We want relationship in our work, collaboration that moves us all forward, hopefully in a way that helps us become a little safer, helps us all learn from the work and from each other — and we're seeing a real hunger for that.
HOP is a label, and under it there are many things — Ivan and I actually teach a lot that isn't in the original HOP, expanding it out into this cultural perspective, for example. As soon as you start to look at it differently, your life can change. I'm going to share a coin here, and describe it for those listening through audio — it's a challenge coin, from the language course I developed for our program; the first cohort actually had this made for me, which was fantastic. On one side, there's a black-and-white image — a black, leafless, dead tree, with a barrier in front of it, like a crosshatched barricade, held up on the ends by two A's. Those A's stand for agentive language. In the middle is a big B, for blame. That black-and-white, cold, dead tree, with blame and agentive language, is what we're trying to move away from. On the other side, there's a colorful image — a beautiful green hill, with a yellow path heading off into the distance, never ending. At the bottom is the word "learning." There are two human hands holding an emerging plant, just starting to grow. Above that is the word "how," with a question mark — the question mark is the important part, not just "how," but any question. At the top is the word "understanding." So on that side, we're saying there's a path of learning in front of all of us, that never ends — we need to be pulled forward along it through the questions we ask, through the desire to learn all we can together, in relationship with each other as people, valuing people. Through that, maybe we'll achieve some kind of understanding in this dynamic world, and reframe things we thought were just truths.
[Mary] If you could go back in time to the beginning of your career — the shift into accident investigation, and away from pure language and more into occupational safety — what's one piece of advice you might give yourself at the start of that journey?
[Crista] Probably that even when it doesn't seem like anyone else is doing what you're doing, or considering things the way you are, it's okay — that shift may just not have happened yet, and you're not crazy. You should feel free to experiment, even have those little "failures" along the way — air quotes there — things that seemed like failures at the time may actually have been your growth. It's a hard road, but like the path on that coin, it's never-ending, and you can always reframe. The relationships and community you develop out of this are amazing, and that's going to be the biggest part — you can help others transform, and in the process, transform yourself.
[Mary] How can our listeners learn more about some of the topics in our discussion today? You mentioned a few books already — are there particular books, websites, or organizations worth checking out?
[Crista] Sure — our book, I'm holding it up now, anyone can get it on Amazon, it's "Human and Organization Potential." As Todd Conklin said, it's not a scary book — we wrote it from the perspective of academics with academic underpinning, so there are a lot of people whose shoulders we stand on, but we wrote it so anyone can read and apply it, not just in a safety role, in any role. We've had all kinds of people who have nothing to do with safety read it and say they got a lot out of it. We'll give you links to my thesis as well, which has a lot of content on language bias and accident investigation guides — agentive language, binary opposition, labels, the things we talked about today, in more depth. There's also another article I'd mention, though unfortunately it's pretty limited to academics with access to academic libraries, and I hate that, I really do — I want open access to things, which is why I think my thesis might be a better resource. And the other link I'd give is to our program at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, in the Advanced Safety Engineering program — it's a master's degree with different tracks, or pathways, as we call them now. You can take a traditional pathway, which isn't bad, it satisfies a lot of people's role requirements, or you can take the pathway for HOP, which Ivan and I teach together — Crisis Leadership, which I promise is mind-blowing, not just about crisis but about relationships and communication, then my Language and Communication class, and a Semiotics class I teach, semiotics being the signs and symbols we use to communicate and create meaning, going even deeper. Ivan teaches our Learning Review course and an HOP course. Within the program, you take those five courses, and come out with great knowledge — an academic degree as well as a lot of dialogue, which is what we do, dialogic classes, and we learn from our students as much as they learn from us. I'll mention an interesting term from the Māori people of New Zealand — "ako" — a story of a teacher and students going into a building, and when they emerge, you cannot tell the teacher from the students. That's our goal. Through the spirit of ako, we try to share, learn, and create this dynamic journey we can all take together, and who knows where it will lead us.
[Mary] If our listeners want to reach out to you directly — through those programs, or is LinkedIn a good way?
[Crista] LinkedIn is a great way to link up with me, and Mary, if you'd include my LinkedIn, you probably have Ivan's there too.
[Mary] Absolutely, that'd be great. Well, that's the end of today's discussion. Thank you so much for sharing your expertise.
[Crista] Thank you so much for this great opportunity — I look forward to hearing from other people too.
[Mary] Listeners, did you enjoy this episode? Are you excited to hear more references to Gershwin songs in the context of workplace safety? If the answer's yes, please give us a review wherever you listen to or watch this podcast, and share it with a colleague. Thanks to the Safety Labs team for creating a show worth sharing. Bye for now. This podcast is created by Safety Products Global, the world's leading manufacturer of safety knives. Through our trusted brands Klever, Slice, and PHC, we empower companies to prevent injuries by providing safer cutting tools for every material and application. Until next time, stay safe.
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